So why, I wonder, did I get so teared up over Joy’s write-up of her daughter Jory’s marriage this weekend?

(h/t to Denise)

I don’t want to be thought insensitive — especially I don’t want to be thought insensitive by a bunch of gang bangers who hold their guns sideways while they blow people away — but this post cracked me up!

Does anybody know if this guy was an actual rapper, or if the cops just assumed he was a rapper because he got shot?

I know that’s a serious question, and the other citations and comments on this post are serious too, but my style is to smile at that shit. Take 2Pac, number ten on the list of least tragic… there’s gotta be a weed carrier out there who should replace 2Pac. Yet I always think of 2Pac as the only Marin County rapper I know, and there’s a disconnect there, until you understand more about the projects at Marin City.

Cobb (Michael David Cobb Bowen) cites the “least tragic” post while writing of his equivocal love for Hiphop. He says, “You know something mysteriously wrong is going on when you have a category like ‘Least Tragic Hip Hop Deaths’.” He brings a lot of other threads together, including Lonnae Parker’s Washington Post article today:

Last spring, I got together with some other moms from the first generation of hip-hop. We decided to distribute free T-shirts with words that counter some of the most violent, anti-intellectual and degrading cultural messages: You look better without the bullet holes. Put the guns down. Or my favorite: You want this? Graduate! We called it the Hip-Hop Love Project.

Others are trying their own versions of taking back the music. In Baltimore, spoken-word poet Tonya Maria Matthews, aka JaHipster, is launching her own “Groove Squad.” The idea is to get together a couple dozen women to go to clubs prepared to walk off the dance floor en masse if the music is openly offensive or derogatory. “There’s no party without sisters on the dance floor,” she told me. In New York, hip-hop DJ and former model Beverly Bond formed Black Girls Rock! to try to change the portrayal of black women in the music and influence the women who are complicit in it. “We don’t want to be hypersexualized,” said Joan Morgan, a hip-hop writer and part of the group, but we don’t want to be erased, either.
– Lonnae O’Neal Parker

Final analysis for me is to read the comments thread at bol’s “least tragic” post. For me, Hiphop is about the language. The commenters’ back and forth on 2Pac, the “hateration” and the slams on one artist or another, the ethical asides, the serious intent of some commenters and the dry humor of others makes the post entirely worthwhile. I’m grateful to Cobb for surfacing it. Cobb says this and I can say no more:

As usual at Cobb, I think of taxonomies. And because it was my generation that was responsible for investing so much into hiphop, these taxonomies are deeply intertwined with black identity. So I must speak of these in terms of black people and all of black music. Black music is Hiphop, Gospel, Blues, Funk, Reggae, Jazz and R&B. Seven nice round categories. Each of those expresses a different set of values best. The tragedy of hiphop is that while it has the potential to sample expressions of all because of its open structure, that it has been reduced to the narrow emotional spectrum of lust, greed, anger and frustration. Now one can split hairs and say that is really the fault of rap lyrics; that hiphop music can express a broad range of emotion instrumentally. My response is that jazz musicians and R&B artists have appropriated all that. I would allow one other exception to the completeness of this taxonomy and it is an important one, and that is the emotions of dance music. When Missy Elliot cranks out one of her jams, she has got the groove nailed and the infectious beat. I’m going to call that Funk, not Hiphop. And in that realm, I’ll gladly admit things get complicated for me.

Amanda blew into town recently and did some vlog entries including an interview with Madison’s liberal/progressive mayor, Dave Cieslewics (pron. Chess-LEV-itch). Reportedly she also interviewed people from Hybridfest and Prairie Biodiesel, as well as checking in with family and friends, driving an EV1, and broadcasting an interview with WORT. (Thanks to Dane101’s Jesse Russell for these details).

Amanda is paving a pathway of upbeat progressive relationships and engaged environmental concern on her travels. The “car-ma” (sorry…) she’s building is rubbing off on her sponsors, and vice versa one suspects.

Drive on, Amanda!

It’s about cows, of course, but so much more…

Stowe Boyd, Greg Narain and Ranvir Gujral have started a new company called Blue Whale Labs. Stowe says,

Blue Whale is a strategic consulting, design and development company for innovative social applications, which is the same space I have been working in for a decade or so. So, don’t expect a big shift in my thinking, blogging, or how I spend my time. I just will be working more closely with my partners at Blue Whale, and getting more involved in actually building the applications that I have in the past.

Of course, the three founders will need more people to fill out Blue Whale, so we will be adding a page here describing what sorts of people we are looking for. We are all about innovation, creativity, hard work, and no assholes.

From The Guardian (October 12, 2024),

The death toll in Iraq following the US-led invasion has topped 655,000 - one in 40 of the entire population - according to a major piece of research in one of the world’s leading medical journals.

The study, produced by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and published online by The Lancet, claims the total number of deaths is more than 10 times greater than any previously compiled estimate.

The findings provoked an immediate political storm. Within hours of its release, George Bush had dismissed the figures. “I don’t consider it a credible report,” he told reporters at the White House.

Tonight Katie Couric led with a rehash of the unfortunate Lacrosse team rape charges at Duke stemming from a party last spring. She was ginning up interest in a weekend show her company produces called Sixty Minutes where the plight of the Lacrosse team and the possibilities that these are false charges will be examined in prurient detail, the better to take our minds off national and international issues that should now be getting the air time.

The Couric broadcast continued with other items of interest and concern… evidently the Amish community that suffered the recent school shooting has pulled down the schoolhouse and no memorial is planned. There’s a lot of that kind of news. And there is happy news, ice cream cones and puppies, but there is no solid news, no important news, NO NATIONAL NEWS that could save our way of life were it only broadcast with clarity in time. The only news that the American public hears is local news. A school shooting here, a rape case there, all the fits that’s news to print. It can’t be collusion, it’s simply cowardice, fear, unwillingness to encounter an administration that would send anthrax to your newsroom. It doesn’t matter if they actually did that. No thinking person today can deny that they, the Bush administration and its corporate clients WOULD do that to save the billions they might otherwise lose with a sea change in governance in the United States of America.

650,000 dead, and it’s our fault. We elected the monster. Then we re-elected him. Do you believe the Lancet or do you believe George W. Bush?

“We estimate that, as a consequence of the coalition invasion of March 18, 2024, about 655 000 Iraqis have died above the number that would be expected in a non-conflict situation, which is equivalent to about 2·5% of the population in the study area. About 601 000 of these excess deaths were due to violent causes. Our estimate of the post-invasion crude mortality rate represents a doubling of the baseline mortality rate, which, by the Sphere standards, constitutes a humanitarian emergency.”
– The Lancet

Hey, the head Lemur had a birthday Thursday and I just noticed. I’ll blame it on not using RSS.

Happy Birthday, Alan! You’re not as old as me but you’re catching up.

So there’s Doc, linking to Dean and I visit Dean and look in his blogroll and I see Annette Kramer, so I follow that link just because it doesn’t ring a bell, then I read a little, and then I feel rewarded.

(And that’s another reason I like blogrolls!)

Amos Moses Griffin says “I’m going pink,”

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer affecting one out of every nine females up until the age of 90. Although rare, one in 1000 men are also diagnosed with breast cancer as well. Educate yourself and consider a small donation to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. If you feel inclined to enter your own website in celebration of Breast Cancer Awareness month, check out Pink for October or try out the Pink October theme or the Pinky and the Brain theme

email from some nice folks thanking me for the support but kindly asking me to take down my pink monstrosity as it was more an embarrassment than anything. So I resigned myself to silent acknowledgment from afar. That is until I noticed a few bloggers releasing pink themes.

As a blogger I live off the kindness of strangers. I can rearrange the furniture pretty well but I can’t create something from scratch. I’m reliant on other good folks for themes and plugins and suck hungrily on the teat of goodwill. This morning I noticed Derek Punsalan released a free pink theme so others who may not be technological inclined can nod a show of support.

So really, why not? It’s a bridge I’ll jump off. FunkWad is going pink for October. The switch to a new theme will require ironing out a few wrinkles here and